• Atmosphere
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.1-12
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• 2019

For the allergy patient who needs to know the situation about the extent of pollen risk, the National Institute of Meteorological Sciences developed a pollen forecasting system based on the Community Multiscale Air Quality Modeling (CMAQ). In the old system, pollen emission from the oak was estimated just based on the airborne concentration and meteorology factors, resulted in high uncertainty. For improving the quality of current pollen forecasting system, therefore the estimation of pollen emission is now corrected based on the observation of pollen emission at the oak forest to better reflect the real emission pattern. In this study, the performance of the previous (NIMS2014) and current (NIMS2016) model system was compared using observed oak pollen concentration. Daily pollen concentrations and emissions were simulated in pollen season 2016 and accuracy of onset and end of pollen season were evaluated. In the NIMS2014 model, pollen season was longer than actual pollen season; The simulated pollen season started 6 days earlier and finished 13.25 days later than the actual pollen season. The NIMS2016 model, however, the simulated pollen season started only 1.83 days later, and finished 0.25 days later than the actual pollen season, showing the improvement to predict the temporal range of pollen events. Also, the NIMS2016 model shows better performance for the prediction of pollen concentration, while there is a still large uncertainty to capture the maximum pollen concentration at the target site. Continuous efforts to correct these problems will be required in the future.

• Journal of Acupuncture Research
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.96-109
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• 2021

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of acupotomy for the treatment of patients with knee osteoarthritis. There were 9 databases searched to retrieve randomized controlled trials until August 3, 2019 regarding acupotomy versus conventional Western medicine, conventional Western medicine treatment with and without acupotomy, and Korean medicine treatment with and without acupotomy, and meta-analysis was performed. Of 303 potentially relevant studies retrieved, 43 were systematically reviewed. All studies were conducted in China. Effective rate, visual analogue scale, and Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis index were used as the evaluation scales. The Ashi point was selected most frequently. In all studies, the intervention group was more effective than the control group. Meta-analysis revealed that acupotomy showed statistically significant beneficial results. Although acupotomy had a beneficial effect on knee osteoarthritis, the risk of bias of the included studies was not low. The majority of the results from the evaluation scales used were highly heterogeneous (> 50%) which reduced confidence in the estimation of effect, or had a small sample size. Further clinical research and development is required in the future.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• v.46 no.1
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• pp.1-7
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• 2021

Background: The use of computed tomography (CT) device has increased in the past few decades in Japan. Dose optimization is strongly required in pediatric CT examinations, since there is concern that an unreasonably excessive medical radiation exposure might increase the risk of brain cancer and leukemia. To accelerate the process of dose optimization, continual assessment of the dose levels in actual hospitals and medical facilities is necessary. This study presents organ dose estimation using pediatric cerebral CT scans in the Kyushu region, Japan in 2012 and the web-based calculator, WAZA-ARI (https://waza-ari.nirs.qst.go.jp). Materials and Methods: We collected actual patient information and CT scan parameters from hospitals and medical facilities with more than 200 beds that perform pediatric CT in the Kyushu region, Japan through a questionnaire survey. To estimate the actual organ dose (brain dose, bone marrow dose, thyroid dose, lens dose), we divided the pediatric population into five age groups (0, 1, 5, 10, 15) based on body size, and inputted CT scan parameters into WAZA-ARI. Results and Discussion: Organ doses for each age group were obtained using WAZA-ARI. The brain dose, thyroid dose, and lens dose were the highest in the Age 0 group among the age groups, and the bone marrow and thyroid doses tended to decrease with increasing age groups. All organ doses showed differences among facilities, and this tendency was remarkable in the young group, especially in the Age 0 group. This study confirmed a difference of more than 10-fold in organ doses depending on the facility and CT scan parameters, even when the same CT device was used in the same age group. Conclusion: This study indicated that organ doses varied widely by age group, and also suggested that CT scan parameters are not optimized for children in some hospitals and medical facilities.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.1-8
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• 2021

To simulate a process model in the field of chemical engineering, it is very important to identify the physical properties of novel materials as well as existing materials. However, it is difficult to measure the physical properties throughout a set of experiments due to the potential risk and cost. To address this, this study aims to develop a property prediction model based on the group contribution method for aromatic chemical compounds including benzene rings. The benzene rings of aromatic materials have a significant impact on their physical properties. To establish the prediction model, 42 important functional groups that determine the physical properties are considered, and the total numbers of functional groups on 147 aromatic chemical compounds are counted to prepare a dataset. Support vector regression is employed to prepare a prediction model to handle sparse and high-dimensional data. To verify the efficacy of this study, the results of this study are compared with those of previous studies. Despite the different datasets in the previous studies, the comparison indicated the enhanced performance in this study. Moreover, there are few reports on predicting the physical properties of aromatic compounds. This study can provide an effective method to estimate the physical properties of unknown chemical compounds and contribute toward reducing the experimental efforts for measuring physical properties.

• The korean journal of orthodontics
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• v.52 no.3
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• pp.182-200
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• 2022

Objective: This study aims to examine the effectiveness of miniscrew assisted rapid palatal expansion (MARPE) treatment in late adolescents and adult patients using cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT). Methods: Literature search was conducted in five electronic databases (PubMed, Embase, Scopus, Web of Science, and Cochrane Library) based on the PICOS keyword design focusing on MARPE. Out of the 18 CBCT screened outcomes, only nine parameters were sufficient for the quantitative meta-analysis. The parameters were classified into three main groups: 1) skeletal changes, 2) alveolar change, and 3) dental changes. Heterogeneity test, estimation of pooled means, publication bias, sensitivity analysis and risk of bias assessment were also performed. Results: Upon database searching, only 14 full-text articles were qualified from the 364 obtained results. Heterogeneity test indicated the use of the random-effects model. The pooled mean estimate were as follows: 1) Skeletal expansion: zygomatic width, 2.39 mm; nasal width, 2.68 mm; jugular width, 3.12 mm; and midpalatal suture at the posterior nasal spine and anterior nasal spine, 3.34 mm and 4.56 mm, respectively; 2) Alveolar molar width expansion, 4.80 mm; and 3) Dental expansion: inter-canine width, 3.96 mm; inter-premolar width, 4.99 mm and inter-molar width, 5.99 mm. The percentage of expansion demonstrated a skeletal expansion (PNS) of 55.76%, alveolar molar width expansion of 24.37% and dental expansion of 19.87%. Conclusions: In the coronal view, the skeletal and dental expansion created by MARPE was of the pyramidal pattern. MARPE could successfully expand the constricted maxilla in late adolescents and adult patients.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.78 no.3
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• pp.351-368
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• 2021

This paper, by applying a reliability-based framework, develops seismic vulnerability macrozonation maps for Tehran, the capital and one of the most earthquake-vulnerable city of Iran. Seismic performance assessment of 3-, 4- and 5-story steel moment resisting frames (SMRFs), designed according to ASCE/SEI 41-17 and Iranian Code of Practice for Seismic Resistant Design of Buildings (2800 Standard), is investigated in terms of overall maximum inter-story drift ratio (MIDR) and unit repair cost ratio which is hereafter known as "damage ratio". To this end, Tehran city is first meshed into a network of 66 points to numerically locate low- to mid-rise SMRFs. Active faults around Tehran are next modeled explicitly. Two different combination of faults, based on available seismological data, are then developed to explore the impact of choosing a proper seismic scenario. In addition, soil effect is exclusively addressed. After building analytical models, reliability methods in combination with structure-specific probabilistic models are applied to predict demand and damage ratio of structures in a cost-effective paradigm. Due to capability of proposed methodology incorporating both aleatory and epistemic uncertainties explicitly, this framework which is centered on the regional demand and damage ratio estimation via structure-specific characteristics can efficiently pave the way for decision makers to find the most vulnerable area in a regional scale. This technical basis can also be adapted to any other structures which the demand and/or damage ratio prediction models are developed.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.27 no.12
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• pp.161-169
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• 2022

With the development of mobile devices and global positioning systems, various location-based services can be utilized, which collects user's location information and provides services based on it. In this process, there is a risk of personal sensitive information being exposed to the outside, and thus Geo-indistinguishability (Geo-Ind), which protect location privacy of LBS users by perturbing their true location, is widely used. However, owing to the data perturbation mechanism of Geo-Ind, it is hard to accurately obtain the density distribution of LBS users from the collection of perturbed location data. Thus, in this paper, we aim to develop a novel method which enables to effectively compute the user density distribution from perturbed location dataset collected under Geo-Ind. In particular, the proposed method leverages Expectation-Maximization(EM) algorithm to precisely estimate the density disribution of LBS users from perturbed location dataset. Experimental results on real world datasets show that our proposed method achieves significantly better performance than a baseline approach.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.38 no.1
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• pp.70-77
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• 2023

Gas has replaced coal or petroleum as primary fuel because of its convenience. However, gas has risk of fire, explosion, or poisoning. To reduce gas-related accidents, many strategic projects have been being carried based on 'Gas Safety Management Basic Plans' on a domestic scale. In spite of those projects, the gas-related accident rate did not decrease over past decades. Thus, this study was conducted to analyze the effectiveness of ongoing projects, and to find out ways to make improvements. Conventional statistical analyses on accident data published by gas-related institutions were not useful to determine meaningful attributes to predict future. Whereas, accident case analyses adopted in the present study discovered differences in the type of people and their unsafe acts for each gas type. Meanwhile, the overall average priority of projects was not high in the aspect of System Safety Precedence. If the current trend is maintained, with sigmoid functions, it can be estimated that mean annual accident rate will decrease by only 2.0% in the next two decades. To improve the current trend, the present study made conclusions as followings: (1) safety projects should be designed with careful consideration of accident traits including gas type, unsafe acts, and persons involved and (2) alternative strategies should include system considerations such as minimum hazard design and safety devices prior to mere education or training. To summarize briefly, the present state related with gas accidents highlights the necessity of a system-based multidisciplinary approach.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Next Generation Computing
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.102-110
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• 2017

Current word sense disambiguation techniques employ various machine learning-based methods. Various approaches have been proposed to address this problem, including the knowledge base approach. This approach defines the sense of an ambiguous word in accordance with knowledge base information with no training corpus. In unsupervised learning techniques that use a knowledge base approach, graph-based and similarity-based methods have been the main research areas. The graph-based method has the advantage of constructing a semantic graph that delineates all paths between different senses that an ambiguous word may have. However, unnecessary semantic paths may be introduced, thereby increasing the risk of errors. To solve this problem and construct a fine-grained graph, in this paper, we propose a model that iteratively constructs the graph while eliminating unnecessary nodes and edges, i.e., senses and semantic paths. The hybrid similarity estimation model was applied to estimate a more accurate sense in the constructed semantic graph. Because the proposed model uses BabelNet, a multilingual lexical knowledge base, the model is not limited to a specific language.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2020.06a
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• pp.154-154
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• 2020

최근 국지성 호우가 빈번하게 발생하고 있고, 이로 인해 국내 도시지역 홍수피해 발생빈도와 피해규모가 증가하고 있다. 2010년, 2011년, 2018년에 서울에서는 홍수로 인한 침수피해가 크게 발생하여 많은 인명과 재산의 피해가 있었다. 이렇듯 도시지역은 타 지역에 비해 인구와 재산이 밀집되어 있어 홍수 취약성이 상대적으로 높은 지역이다. 국내에서는 홍수피해 저감을 위해 홍수예보를 발령하고 있다. 하지만 국내 홍수예보는 국가하천 및 지방하천의 주요 하천 구간에서만 실시되고 있어 이러한 하천에 접하지 않는 지역은 국가 홍수예보의 수혜를 받을 수 없다. 그렇기 때문에 각 지역에서는 홍수 대응을 위해 기상청의 호우특보 기준을 사용하고 있으며 이 기준은 전국적으로 동일하다는 특징이 있다. 하지만 각 도시지역은 과거 홍수피해에 따라 방재시설을 추가로 설치하거나 보수하고 있어 각 지역의 방재시설 현황 및 홍수에 대한 취약성 정도가 다른 상황이다. 그러므로 전국적으로 동일한 강우기준이 적용되어 발령되고 있는 호우 특보는 실제 각 도시지역의 방재현황이 고려되지 못한다는 문제가 있다. 이와 관련하여 과거 낙동강 지역을 대상으로 지역별 홍수위험도에 따른 홍수위험지수를 산정하고 검토한 연구가 수행된 바 있다. 본 연구에서는 각 도시지역의 방재 현황을 고려하여 강우기준을 보정할 수 있는 가중치를 산정하는 방안에 대해 제시하였다. 이를 위해 서울 지역 25개 기초지자체를 대상으로 연구를 진행하였으며, 홍수 취약성을 평가하기 위한 세부인자는 노출도, 민감도, 적응도로 구분하였다. 각 세부인자 별 가중치를 산정하기 위해서는 엔트로피 방법을 적용하였고, 산정된 결과를 이용하여 각 지역 별 가중치를 산정하기 위해서는 유클리드 거리 산정법을 적용하였다. 그 결과 각 지역의 방재 특성을 고려한 가중치를 산정할 수 있었으며 향후에는 지역 별 방재특성이 고려된 강우기준을 제시 및 적용성을 검토할 계획이다.